Not one, but two same-sex pairs of flamingos at the Edinburgh Zoo have adopted chicks recently, the zoo reports.
Five Chilean flamingo chicks were born at the zoo between August and September this year, the zoo reported. Senior Bird Keeper Nick Dowling said:
When the first egg arrived the parenting couple got really excited and accidentally knocked it off the nest — their natural instinct was then to abandon the egg. We don’t usually intervene with our flamingo flock but as this was our first egg since 2010, we carefully picked it up and placed it back on the nest. Luckily, one of our same-sex male couples went straight onto the nest, fostered the egg and raised it as their own.
The last of the five eggs was laid by “a young, first time couple,” and was then “stolen” by the zoo’s second male couple. Dowling explained, “Chilean flamingos are very paternal so often the more dominant couples will squabble with the inexperienced parents and ‘steal’ the egg.”
Not that any human same-sex couple would condone such behavior, of course. Here’s the really interesting part, though. Dowling notes that the chicks will continue to feed from their dads for the next few months since “both male and female flamingos produce a nutritious, milk-like substance called crop milk.”
I was going to say that I’d bet some gay human parents would be jealous of the crop milk — but upon further investigation, I discovered that crop milk is “a curd-like substance … created from fat-filled cells that line the crop and regurgitated” to feed the young. Now I’m not so sure.
These aren’t the first gay flamingo parents. Two male greater flamingos raised chicks together at Britain’s Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire starting in 2001. They first raised three chicks by stealing the eggs of other pairs, and then were given an egg from an abandoned nest. Keepers say they are just as caring as different-sex pairs in raising their young.
And of course there are many same-sex penguin parents — but only a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.